Crime Scene Kitchen Season 2 Winners Answer Our Burning Qs About Tasting, Smelling, and That Pesky Joel McHale
The following contains spoilers from the Crime Scene Kitchen Season 2 finale.
As Fox’s Crime Scene Kitchen Season 2 came to a close on Monday night, a batch of filled croissant muffins and one “Dark & Stormy” cake aimed to separate the winners from the also-rans.
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Yet when none of the three remaining teams got the final bake right, judges Yolanda Gampp and Curtis Stone had to make a tough call — and they determined that the Season 2 champs would be Baltimore’s Amber Croom (the founder of And 4 Dessert) and Yassmeen Haskins (founder of Cocoa & Nuts Pastries).
TVLine hopped on a Monday morning Zoom with the dynamic duo to reflect on their Crime Scene investigations and learn some secrets from the show….
TVLINE | What would people be surprised to know about Crime Scene Kitchen? Anything we aren’t seeing, aren’t fully appreciating…?
AMBER | They think that we go straight from the Crime Scene Kitchen to baking, and then wonder why we don’t remember ingredients. That’s because they don’t know that it’s like an hour, or two, between the time we actually do that and filming.
TVLINE | When you’re in the Crime Scene Kitchen, are the other teams across the stage able to see what you’re noticing or poking at?
AMBER | No, they cannot. They are very strict with it.
TVLINE | What is the hardest part about the clue gathering? It is looking everywhere all at once, or remembering everything after?
YASSMEEN | Remembering! And doing math! [Laughs]
TVLINE | This season more then last seemed to go hard on red herrings. I mean, for one bake there was a packed lunch in the fridge that was totally irrelevant!
YASSMEEN | And there’s stuff that the viewers did not see.
AMBER | Oh my gosh, yeah. Y’all didn’t even see some of the clues that we had. But even with the honey in the other challenge, you were supposed to weigh the jars to figure out which had the least amount of stuff in it! We’ve got two minutes in this kitchen, who is going to be spending this valuable time weighing jars?? They did add a lot of red herrings and a lot more difficult elements to decipher. It’s not as easy as people think it is. I thought that way the first season, but once you get in it, it’s a totally different ballgame.
TVLINE | I’ve always been curious, are there are instances where your’e not allowed to taste a clue? Like, with the Dark & Stormy cake, that could have helped you tell the difference between ginger and lime on the zester.
AMBER | They were very specific, they let us know what could be tasted and what couldn’t. So while there were elements that were edible in the kitchen, we couldn’t taste some of them; the most you could do is smell.
TVLINE | I’m also thinking about the smudge of raspberry you saw on one apron….
AMBER | The cherry/raspberry challenge, yep. Yass and I went back and forth on that one, because essentially it looked the same, but there were microscopic raspberry seeds on it, if you really looked at it.
TVLINE | Does the aroma from the neighboring kitchens ever come into play? Like, “Wait, what are they doing over there?”
YASSMEEN | Yes! Absolutely. [In Episode 2, Amber and Yass made two raspberry donuts, two blueberry donuts and two maple bacon chocolate donuts, but the safety bake was two strawberry jelly-filled sugar donuts, two chocolate, and two pink donuts.] In the donut challenge? You smelled bacon the entire time.
AMBER | The funny thing is we can smell it and we can hear sounds, but we can’t actually make out voices, unless somebody yells. But we can definitely hear yelling and banging — à la the French team. [Laughs]
TVLINE | I feel like on at least one occasion, [host] Joel [McHale] stopped in your kitchen at not at all a good time.
AMBER | But Yass and I came up with a method for dealing with that: I would “babysit” Joel while she would be working [on the bake]. He purposely comes in as a distraction, and it’s never at the best time, so Yass would go into a corner and start working on something, while I talk to Joel. He was a bit of an “older brother getting on your nerves for no reason.” [Laughs]
TVLINE | What it’s like to present your work and you hear Yolanda say things like your clafoutis is “electrifying,” or she stomps her feet with giddiness over your pear tarte tatin ?
AMBER | That is the biggest compliment that we could have ever gotten — especially in our culture, when somebody’s stomping their foot and rocking back and forth, we know we got ’em. And this is Yolanda! That’s what we want, and I think we were the only, or the first, ones to get that reaction from her.
YASSMEEN | [In my pastry business] I don’t really see my clients, so to have Curtis Stone and Yolanda really give that instant gratification is an amazing thing. But it was also complete butterflies in my stomach every time we walked up. I knew our stuff was good, but to be in the presence of someone who’s actually going to taste it…? I could not handle it. It was too much. I wanted to hide. Talk about anxiety!
TVLINE | Outside of actually winning, what was your team’s highest high during the process? The strawberry cutout cake (from Episode 2, seen above)?
YASSMEEN | Absolutely. My highest high was the strawberry cake. But also because there was this quiet moment that Amber and I had between us, and I go, “Yeah….”
AMBER | When we went into this, Yass was always 100% “We could do this,” and I was always “We could do this,” 70%. The first challenge was very humbling, so you’re like, “OK, this is not going to be as easy as we thought it might have been,” bur the more we went through it and found our groove, we looked at each other like, “OK, we still in this! This is real. OK. OK. Let’s go.”
TVLINE | Were you as gobsmacked as I that Dwight Howard’s favorite dessert is a floating island (île flottante)?
AMBER | I’m not convinced. I’m not convinced. Photo proof, or it didn’t happen! Everybody said that! “Dwight Howard knows what a floating island is?!”
TVLINE | Is or is not Camille played by Kristen Wiig?
AMBER | [Laughs] It is an absolutely possibility. I could see that — and now I won’t be able to unsee that! Camille is great, she is absolutely hilarious. She is a joy and a treat.
TVLINE | Heading into the final bake of the finale, what was your initial reaction when you saw that you’d have a whole extra minute to gather clues? Was it, “Uh-oh”?
YASSMEEN | It is the season finale, the final bake, we got a whole extra minute, I am thinking, “It is too early in the day for me to remember all of this stuff!” [Laughs] “But we’re gonna do it.” I was nervous.
TVLINE | Yolanda, who picked out that bake, even says at one point, “I was really hard on them.”
YASSMEEN | Did she??
AMBER | Initially you’re like, “Three minutes! Extra time!” Then you’re like, “Wait, why do we need extra time?” So I knew it was going to be a lot. Yass and I always talk about “closing all the tabs.” Being classically trained, we have so many different recipes and techniques in our mind that all these “tabs” stay open, so before we went into that final Crime Scene, I had to “wipe my browser” and just digest everything, and don’t try to figure it out then. Just sit with it, and then do it.
TVLINE | My jaw dropped twice during the finale — first when Camille and Laissa didn’t know what the popover pan was. And regarding No. 2, what was going through your mind when the Confectionator revealed that nobody got the final bake right?
YASSMEEN | Oh, I laughed. I laughed so hard. And then I’m thinking, “All right, bring on the next challenge.”
AMBER | We both thought, “We’re doing a sudden death challenge.” Once we saw what we did, and once we saw what everyone else did, we were like, “None of this is right. This is gonna be very interesting.”
TVLINE | If only you’d been able to taste that zester with the ginger on it.
AMBER | I was talking to Yass about that, and we even had a conversation with the culinary producer, who was like, “You couldn’t smell that on there?” And we were like, “No!” Yeah, so many elements in that challenge.
TVLINE | Lastly, please, please tell me that after the taping of each show, the teams huddle together with forks to sample each other’s work.
YASSMEEN | No. Sadly, no. In between judging, you kind of run and sneak into somebody’s kitchen, and you have a fork or a spoon in your back pocket, and you take a bite and run back to the stage. But that’s as far as it goes.
AMBER | There were times we didn’t even get to taste our own stuff!
YASSMEEN | We really have to go off of what the judges’ feedback is, because unless you bake an extra one, you don’t know what your product going in front of them tastes like. So Amber and I always baked two, and we made sure we tasted and sampled as much as we could during the challenge, because we both wanted to be able to defend our bakes. Not that this is the type of game where you necessarily need to defend your bake, but you need to defend the clues and what you made.
AMBER | We always made more than we needed, No. 1 because you weren’t sure if you were going to burn or mess up something. But also, as she said, you want to quality-control your own product.
TVLINE | Your speeches after winning had Yolanda extremely teary-eyed, I don’t know if you saw that.
AMBER | No, we haven’t seen it yet!
YASSMEEN | [Watching the finale] is going to be emotional for Amber and I because while we lived it, it’s very raw, it’s still very raw, to just be standing in front of everybody, friends and family, to see this. I don’t know if people understand that pastry chefs sometimes are “typecast,” I guess you could say. Like, our friends and family believe we bake one way, and this is the first time that people really get to understand the level which Amber and bake at, and that’s really gratifying for uI mean, I have tingles just thinking about what tonight is going to be like for them to see, because between the phone calls and text messages and everybody saying, “I never heard of that dessert before,” people are expanding their palettes when it comes to dessert. It’s very easy to expand your palette with basic, savory food — you see it on Instagram, you want to try it! — but for pastries, it’s like, “I like cake, I like chocolate icing, I like vanilla ice cream, and I like key lime pie.” That’s all you need to know. But when you put pastry behind it, that conversation changes. So now Amber and I are having conversations with children who want to know, “What’s the difference between classically trained and self-taught?” “Can I go to culinary school just for pastry?” And I’m excited about that!
REWATCH AMBER & YASS’ WINNING MOMENT BELOW:
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